No, you can’t have the iPad! A rant about school reading in the digital age.

As an educator, I understand the benefits of online learning tools, particularly the easy access they provide to a wide range of material and information. However, as a parent I cannot overstate how much I hate my daughter’s online reading programme. I’m not going to name it for fear of accusations of online slander, but I hate it. HATE IT. It is the ruiner of evenings, the sucker of time, and the destroyer of the love of the written word.

I’ve decided not to waste my family’s time on it anymore.

As I wrote to the girl-child’s teacher today, “Just thought I'd let you know that my daughter won't be doing her reading for the next week (maybe longer) because there is a blanket iPad ban in our house at the moment, thanks to a couple of pretty extraordinary tantrums.”

Naturally, I made concessions about making notes in her agenda about books read and comprehension attained – BECAUSE I AM A LITERARY SCHOLAR AND ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THIS – but really and truly, I cannot cope with the iPad wars in the name of education. Just send her home with an actual book.

For those who don’t know these kind of programmes, they’re apps which have a full set of reading books. You work through the lettered levels, like you would with your old printed reading books. They look just like the books and you swipe to turn the page. It’s a solid interface. However, the app my daughter uses reads the book to the child first, then you need to sit with the kid while she reads it, and then there are 5 to 10 multi-choice comprehension questions. It’s a good programme and I’m sure it works well for self-directed learning in the classroom, but at home with reluctant and disgruntled children it takes FOREVER.

Let’s be honest here, a lot of school reading books aren’t the most exciting stories. Well, obviously The Hungry Lambs, Boat Day, The Stars in the Sky, and Sliding and Flying (ooh, mustn’t forget The Sweet Porridge!*) had awesome stories, but that was in New Zealand during my time in primers. These American readers are mostly dull, and as you get up the levels, they’re pretty long.

Photo courtesy of Waterview Heritage Project

My immediate concern with having the story read to my child first was that she avoided having to figure out words for herself, but there are other issues with the interface. It can be hard to track text on a backlit screen (that’s why Kindles are so great), and on an iPad you can’t use your finger to follow the text. Because every time you touch the screen you run the risk of turning the page, which is pretty frustrating for a little kid. Also, if I forget to lock the aspect, every time my daughter turns the iPad slightly, the page flips round. Awesome. Ooh, let’s make an annoying game of that, shall we? Oh, yes, we shall.

Of course, the most galling thing about this app is that it’s on an iPad, and as we know, iPads are portals to child wonderment in the form of games and videos and a misguided perception of cool stuff somewhere else they can’t quite access, so who wants to read a boring school book when you’re on an iPad. Thanks, Steve Jobs. Oh yeah, I know you limited your kids from using your devices, but now the schools have made them compulsory. Cheers for that.

With every story comes bitter complaints for a game. Just one game. Just one.

It’s an iPad. They never want just one game, so soon the whinging and the negotiations and wailings begin, quickly followed by the blind rage of having the precious bloody iPad taken from their singularly focused persons. 

Reading is fun!

But wait, there’s more. While all this is going on, you’re dealing with the other child protesting his lack of the iPad. “But why does she get it? I want the iPad! It’s not fair. I want to read too. I want a game.”

And my boy-child is even worse when it comes to the bloody iPad.

Suffice to say, it’s up high, away, not to be used again. Probably until I get grief from my daughter’s teacher for not doing the reading.

* Let it be known that I did not have to look up these titles from the Ready to Read collection; they were so universally important to New Zealand education and reading that I just know them. I’ll always know them. Here's a picture of The Hungry Lambs, because hungry lambs make me happy about school reading.

By the (frozen) rivers of Babylon

It was at the post office on an absolutely frigid day in January 2014. We had been in Canada little over six months, and as the coldest winter in 30 years was setting in, the novelty of my new life as an immigrant was wearing off.

I was sending something back home and making cheery chitchat with the lady behind the counter. We were on friendly enough terms and she was asking me how things were going. Then she asked me directly:

“But how are you, really?”

She wore her own status as a landed immigrant in her accent, and I knew exactly what she meant.

I’m ok. Everyone is very nice and I’m in a privileged position as an immigrant. I mean, my husband lived here as a child, so we know people, and we have contacts. At least I speak English! But…

“Do you have a job?”

Then in that suburban strip mall post office, the outpouring began. My newfound comrade took the reins of the conversation, explaining how she had moved from India 12 years earlier, and how difficult it had been to find work as an immigrant. How it didn’t matter what her qualifications were, or years of experience, because all anyone cared about was “Canadian experience,” and how her husband never really understood because he got to go to work and meet interesting people, but she was stuck inside in the depths of a foreign winter with the children going mad and no one to explain to her what to do, and no one was that interested in who she really was.

Her rant full of experience and her concern for me as an individual was a lifeline, because in my privilege as a white, English-speaking, highly-educated immigrant, I was denying the shock of being a stranger in a new land. It allowed me to get upset for the first time since we arrived.

I never came to Canada expecting to waltz into my dream job. I am an academic and a musician; we know the dream job is often an unattainable beast, but I expected to be given a chance. I was upset because this act of settlement had shown me with frightening clarity that without the context of your family, friends, work connections, and a general knowledge of your abilities, you are just a faceless applicant with a CV. Whether I stated it or not, my CV screamed woman in her 30s, mother of two young children. NEXT.

My time in Canada hasn’t been all bad by any stretch of the imagination. I have picked up teaching work, I have presented research, I have sung in a professional capacity, and I have made friends with locals and other highly-qualified-but-out-of-work immigrants alike. But I am leaving, returning to a sense of connectedness and community I never fully appreciated until now.

  

People who have never moved countries always talk about your family. “Oh, it must be so hard without your parents nearby.” Yes, but there’s more. It’s hard always having to ask where to get basic services, and always having to check the nature of some specific bureaucracy. It’s frustrating to suddenly realise that you can’t call your doctor friends to check if the specialist you’ve been referred to is any good, because it dawns on you that you don’t know any doctors here. Hang on, you don’t actually know any lawyers either should the need arise for something to be signed, and you’re in a new country so there’s always something that has to be signed. How do I not know any lawyers? It feels like half my family and university friends and their parents are lawyers back home. Hell’s teeth, in Auckland, I’m a phone call away from a friendly chat with a couple of QCs to clarify a point, if I ever needed. My family are by no means “society”, but you don’t live in a city for six generations without knowing a few people.

Even in Scotland, where I studied for my PhD, my status as an active member of a university department, not to mention singing with St. Giles Cathedral, gave me connections to public institutions, the arts, the medical fraternity, the Church of Scotland, the legal profession, even the Scottish Executive. Just knowing those contacts are there is an immense comfort when you are a young, single woman in a new country. It makes you feel like you belong.

For my first year in Canada, despite making friends, actively trying to find work, joining research groups and choirs, it felt like I was mostly at home, and that my only social role was at the school gate or signing permission forms for my children.

Nothing I had done previously was of much relevance to the people around me. I was starting over, which is extremely difficult when you’re in your 30s and your primary focus is your children. At this stage in your life, you rely on walking into a rehearsal or seminar and having people say, “hey, Erin! We haven’t seen you for a while. Kids keeping you busy? Oh, by the way, you’re a bit of an expert on Margaret Fuller, right? What’s the deal with that letter to Beethoven?” Or asking me if I can help organise something because they know I rock at telling musicians what to do.  

Instead, I got condescending smiles and indifference when I gave my apologies for next week because I couldn’t get babysitting.

I am leaving Canada in a few months and returning to Auckland, where I can’t swing a cat without it hitting someone I know. So, you might be wondering where this post is going. Well, whenever you hear someone make some ill-informed comment about refugees and immigrants coming over here (wherever here might me) and stealing jobs and services, just tell them to stop being so ridiculous. Tell them how difficult and lonely it can be even for those of us who immigrate in the very best of circumstances. Tell them to spare a thought for all the people who have to, for whatever reason, give up their communities and connections for the hope of a better life. Remind them that that “better life” can be one shrouded in daily indifference and at times active hostility from new neighbours. Tell them to take the time to ask a new immigrant, “But how are you, really?”

The nostalgia of illness

It was the 1980s and this little girl always got sick.

I have a little theory muddling around about nostalgia and the various arguments against vaccination.

Yes, nostalgia.

With a measles outbreak in the USA now entering Canada, not to mention mumps going round the players of the NHL (hope all those boys are vaccinated, unless they don’t mind the potential side-effect of sterility), there’s a lot about vaccines in the media at the moment. AS THERE BLOODY WELL SHOULD BE. Marvels of modern medicine they are, and we should count ourselves lucky that we live in a society that so freely gives them and also allows the vanity of deciding not to have them. Yes, vanity.  

But anyway, I don’t want to discuss the science or the pros and cons. There is nothing to debate. Unless there is some medically necessitous reason why your child cannot receive a vaccine, you should vaccinate your children. And, if you don’t, I think you more than a little foolish, certainly selfish, and agree with a recent article in the New Republic which says you’re an individualistic product of western capitalism.

Anyway, nostalgia. It’s a pretty powerful thing. The sense of a pre-digital, pre-industrial, prelapsarian time when we were natural, and children fought off illnesses because of their peck of dirt and healthy constitutions. It’s bollocks of course, because you only need to go through a graveyard to see the clusters of children buried during measles, diphtheria, and typhus outbreaks. Often groups of children from one family, buried within weeks of each other. The young adults who must have presumed they had dodged the contagious illness bullet, only to be struck down horribly in their prime. Go graveyard visiting sometime - it ain’t fun. Also, if there is an old family photo of a relative who died in childhood, frame and hang it on your wall to remind you that although your grandparents may have lived hale and hearty lives, some of their siblings and cousins, and aunts and uncles did not. 

However, we don’t do that. We think mostly of our own relatively mild cases of measles and the week or so we had off school, maybe watching the daytime soaps once we improved, and perhaps the trip to the toy shop we made when we got better, forgetting that we were actually vaccinated, so our case of measles was ridiculously mild compared with the full-blown disease, and we haven’t the first clue what we’re talking about. That is actually my memory of English measles at the age of nine. I don’t have to remember, like my parents’ generation, children at school dying – I remember receiving a new Sylvanian Family toy. SCORE! My memory of German Measles (Rubella), however, isn’t so complete. Why? I wasn’t vaccinated – you got the vaccine at 11 in those days - so I was actually very sick. I also got a secondary infection, so I probably suffered from delirium and don’t have pleasant days-off-school memories. Because being very sick sucks.

Worse still, we think about literary instances like Esther Summerson in Bleak House miraculously surviving the small pox. MIRACULOUSLY. There’s a clue somewhere in that word. Or we have in the back of our minds the romantic trope of illness and reconciliation, like Gilbert getting typhoid fever in Anne of the Island, and Anne suddenly realising that it was always him just as she was about to lose him. Gilbert “gets the turn” and recovers, but L.M. Montgomery doesn’t go into detail about the four week course of the illness that would have involved nearly a fortnight of raging fever; nor the dehydration, bleeding and diarrhoea that would have left Gilbert practically skeletal from the inability to consume anything. Montgomery didn’t need to because her audience understood. Her audience realised that even once Gilbert was past the point of danger, Anne wasn’t going near that place for another few weeks. There’s no rushing to the bedside with typhoid. 

Some of these illnesses, like typhoid, have been reduced by good hygiene and antibiotics, but the majority of those scourges of childhood have no treatment, and can only be prevented by the wonders of vaccines.  

Anyway, I don’t condemn this nostalgia. We all love a happy ending, but these narratives are not supposed to make us sentimental about illness, they’re meant to remind us how fortunate we are to be alive. I also don’t condemn this nostalgia because I experience it myself. I was a sick little girl for two months in 1985. I had an extremely bad strain of glandular fever and spent a month in bed. I then spent a second month recovering. I then spent another month slowly integrating back into school. It took a full five years to get over the disease properly. In my memory, those months were a golden autumn of kindly doctor attention, and days lying in bed listening to the hits of the 50s, 60s, and 70s on the radio. Of not having to go to school.

But, it’s important to remember that I wasn’t at risk of dying. Not even close. This was the best kind of illness: all the days off school and none of the stress; plenty of inconvenience for my parents, but none of the desperate worry.  

Nevertheless, the two songs I remember most from that time are illuminating:

“Help me, help me, help me sail away. Well give me two good reasons why I oughta stay.” [“Lazy Sunny Afternoon” The Kinks]

“Where do you go to, my lovely? When you’re alone in your bed? Tell me the thoughts that surround you; I want to look inside your head, yes I do.” [“Where do you go to my lovely” Peter Sarstedt]

Seven-year-olds aren’t very subtle, and maybe being sick wasn’t as fun as I remember.

However, it makes for a good story. A story of being sick and surviving, which can be so rare in our privileged times. Such stories have cultural capital.

My aunt and my mother have such stories. Of almost dying from now utterly avoidable childhood diseases – scarlet fever and polio, respectively. They are their stories to tell, but they could be so easily manipulated into the narratives of anti-vaccination. Or of tales about how the body heals itself and we are all the stronger for it.

Of course they are not such stories; they are tales of the wonders of modern medicine. Of the right doctors doing the right things when it was so desperately required. They are tales of how the body survives, but there is irreparable damage. They are tales of two women who nearly died from childhood diseases, who subsequently have other desperate health stories to tell you. How you fall victim to one serious illness and your body becomes more and more susceptible to others. How one illness can lead to another your whole long life.

So don’t fall victim to the nostalgic narrative that “we all had measles as kids and we were fine.” We all didn’t. Some of us live with the ongoing repercussions of our illnesses. Some of us didn’t live to tell that story at all.

Get your kids vaccinated for all our sakes.